CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Nicolas - This has come up a number of times during training sessions. Pretty much everytime we review inherited memberships folks ask about the possibility of limiting the number.

I'm thinking the display of "related contacts" on the Membership Form as described in CRM-10012 needs some refining. If we do this on create, then that section needs to be added dynamically (via jQuery) only after a membership type is selected AND that membership type is inheritable AND the contact we are creating the membership for has relationships of the inheritable type. This is a bit easier on membership edit because we already know the membership type when the form is built.

Also need to think about how to handle "over the limit" self-service situations. For example, someone purchases a membership on behalf of an organization and that membership is inherited by "employees of". If that organization already has > max_related_members employees in the DB, what do we do?

Is the 'over subscription' anything like 'waitlisting' for events?

I am interested in this functionality!

We would like to add organizational memberships (academic groups, companies) but do not want to grant membership to all employees of the organization, but rather allow up to 10 student members and 3 regular memberships under the organizational membership. 

Student memberships for an organization are transient, so we need any easy way for the organizations contact to be able to update the list and add/delete members to determine who should be granted the relationship.

I started to look at adding a custom form to add the reference field for users to build a list for an admin to add the relationships, but I'm worried about the warnings of exposing the complete member list.  Many user names are not obvious as some were imported from an email list so username is an email address.    It would be ideal if the membership could be added from the institutional membership page. We would need some form of matching lookup to avoid creating duplicate accounts.  (which I still have in any case)

What happens if the selected contact already has a regular membership?  say a student membership - would they inherit the institutional membership and have 2 memberships or would their student membership be renewed/upgraded?  Would a paid on behalf model make more sense for my use case?

Please keep me posted - if there is a MIH project in the works we may be able to help out...

best,
Merlise

What you describe would fit our needs as I am trying to avoid setting up organizational memberships that require a lot of  (non-existent) back-office support!

Merlise,

This is just how the 'inherited' membership work in CiviCRM: there is one membership on the organization, and one membership on the individual referencing the 'parent' membership. You are able to send the renewal notices either to the organization, the individual or both by using the advanced search. You could also design your renewal templates differently based on whether they are sent to the organization or the individual that inherited the membership. This is very flexible system that can accommodate nearly every situation.

--Nicolas.

If I may add to possible requirements...

I have the same functional need as described in the posts, limiting the number of allowed members for each paid membership.  However, I would also like to allow for an additional charge option to add any other members over the limit.  Some companies would legitimately need more members in their membership.  Or, the scenario where you have say 3 levels of membership, with limits (4 member limit, 15 member limit, 50 member limit).  If a company just needed 5 or 6 members, you would like to be able to accommodate that by charging for the 5th and 6th member.

Would love to hear opinions on this.